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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (54907)	8/19/2000 8:54:38 AM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Always seems to me that letting kittens do their own exploring is the best way for them to learn about the world. It lets them gradually add to their world without encountering anything too dangerous until they are more prepared for it. When I kept a couple of barn cats, we found that the mothers had such grandiose schemes for activities, that we would consider it quite lucky if even one kitten survived out of a litter. In fact, my best mousing cat probably only raised one or two kittens to adulthood during her life... which was rather long and illustrious from a mousing point of view. Most kittens "disappeared"... presumably taken somewhere never to return... In fact, sometimes we knew that the mother had had kittens but we never did get to see them until they were a few weeks old. Then they would "appear" suddenly in the barn... where they might be stepped on by a horse, or end up smothered under the goats if they tried to sleep on their backs in winter... or perhaps grabbed by a fox or one of the stray dogs that would "pass through" occasionally... And failing any of those mishaps, they often didn't "make it" as they tried to follow their mother on one of her persistent attempts to get them to cross the highway to the fields where our neighbours used to grow corn years ago... I sometimes wonder if this was just a thinly disguised attempt at feline infanticide... Then there was the year that the kittens all developed some bizarre neurological disorder... possibly after exposure to some form of herbicide that had been sprayed on the neighbour's crops... One kitten died and the rest were so horribly effected by the disorder that I had them put down, and at the advice of a friend in the federal gov't animal health department, we had them checked for rabies... they were negative to that, but there was a gross but unidentifiable alteration to the brain... hmmm..... this is not a very nice post, is it? But now that I've typed it all out, it seems a waste not to post it. I guess that all I can say is that sometimes "farm life" isn't all that it's cracked up to be... might actually be easier being a city cat